


Circumnavigating the Inevitable

by dizzy



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-09
Updated: 2015-08-09
Packaged: 2018-04-23 20:28:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4891030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dizzy/pseuds/dizzy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Quarter-life crisis averted.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Circumnavigating the Inevitable

Sometimes Dan wonders why he's not more freaked out by his life.

There are times when it feels like he's lived twenty years in the past six. Other times it feels like he went to sleep at eighteen with a crush on a boy he'd never met and woke up with a career that's magnificent despite the stress and the most healthy domestic partnership he could have ever imagined.

In those early days of university, there was a time when he was terrified of a bland horizon that involved getting up and going in to a law office every day. Mind numbing fear of a life he knew he didn't want, and the shithead inside of him is grateful everyday he isn't subject to the life that most normal people lead. He loves the traveling, loves the constant new avenues for creativity, loves that he gets to make this entire world with the person he loves to be around most.

There's a lot he doesn't love, too. He doesn't love the privacy invasion. He doesn't love that his temper gets the best of him. He doesn't love that at eighteen he had no concept of what it meant to hide his heart from the world and keep the best parts to himself. He's not embarrassed by what his past self felt or experience or even said; he's just frustrated that he didn't have the foresight to limit his audience to the people he was actually speaking to.

They worked it out, though. That seems to be their special ability as a couple; nothing keeps them apart, nothing keeps them down for long.

They're still not a perfect couple. There's nothing perfect about himself and Phil, not on their own or together, but perfect has never held much appeal anyway. They're good, the two of them; they balance each other in the right ways, they keep up that ying and yang. Yeah, a relationship needs chemistry, it needs passion, but mostly it needs compatibility.

Yeah, they're not in the honeymoon phase anymore. Yeah, their life is exciting on the outs but domestic within. The sex is good but it doesn't happen every night. Sometimes they even genuinely sleep in different bedrooms when one wants to sleep and the other just lounge.

Should that bother him? He's twenty four years old and he's essentially someone's husband, minus the paperwork. Shouldn't he want more? Shouldn’t he just want to be raving drunk half the time and sticking his dick in whatever passes? 

But, no, why would he? What could actually be nicer in life than having someone he can turn to with anything, for anything? It's a balm to his anxiety alone, the fact that he found that person who puts him at ease just by existing in the same space. Why would he feel restless when just thinking of what he has at home still sends little tendrils of warmth blooming just behind his breastbone? Maybe fireworks don't spark every time Phil walks into the room, but Dan still feels the loss keenly when he walks out.

There’s still nothing quite so nice in the world as crawling into bed beside Phil when Phil’s already fast asleep, just laying close and listening to him and breathing him in. There’s nothing like having a bad day and get spoiled a little bit for it, having dinner made or a special treat brought home. There’s _nothing_ like the way Phil’s eyes go soft and sweet when Dan does the same for him. That’s what their love has become now that the passion’s died off a little; they’re just each other’s favorite person and what they are means they’re allowed to claim it, own it, show it off - even when they don’t define it to the world.  

He's never done well being in his own head for too long. He knows without having to look elsewhere that it takes a certain person to not only not mind that but embrace it, embrace Dan and all his fucked up emotional issues for what they are. They're both testing the boundaries of what they can be on their own but the tether they feel to each other is safety and security, not obligation. The professional connection lends to the personal need, and it's the system they're building their life and financial stability upon. It works, inside and out, through and through, and the older they get the less they actually care if people can see the holes in the plan.

He's only twenty four but he's exactly where he wants to be right now, and no amount of being told he's too young to really want to settle down can change the fact that when he fantasizes while his eyes unfocus on his laptop screen it's not wild orgies and a bachelor life preoccupying him. It's how he'll decorate the house they'll eventually get and what kind of dog it'll be and that weird blurry time-skip-jump daydream of Phil aged on a few years, Phil with a kid, Phil standing across from him at an aisle. Not yet, not now, not really any time soon - but eventually.


End file.
